34
Regulations of Your Excellency's Government.
12.
As for the contradictory evidence, to which Your Excellency alludes, of the parties themselves, I am inclined to think that no fair deduction of the actual truth from those statements can reasonably be expected. Persons kidnapped or inveigled into the Barraccons must fail to appreciate the extent to which at Macao they may with security detail all the facts, as a Servant of a respectable European here, that his relatives are respectable, and that he was a person extremely unlikely to sign any contract binding him for eight years to labor in a distant country for a scanty pittance in the service of any party who might purchase the transfer of his contract, or in other words to whom he might be sold for a stringent term of years under most conditions of servitude. I do not undertake to explain his apparent prevarication and contradictions when under examination at Macao unless as the effect of terror. In the instance of the man Hoow-a, on whose behalf I recently interceded, there is no doubt that such is his real name and that a contract with a totally different name was produced as signed by him. It is also certain that he had been told that he had taken money willingly, which was to be afterwards deducted from his wages.